Wow..what a day. Lots to talk about. First, the hardware. Everything got installed…everything but the very thing I was forced to wait a week to get my hands on it (the CPU Cooler). It wasn’t for the fact the box was upside down when I got it, but the cooler wanted to Brock Lesner my RAM (aka crush it). Fortunately (and also unfortunately at the same time), my little “OH GOD!! SO HOT!!” screamer of a CPU cooler still fits.
It’s very unfortunate the new cooler I paid nearly $70 for, wouldn’t work. The ‘funny’ thing about it, I was told it would in Discord…however, I will give them the benefit of a doubt that they didn’t know my case (though I do remember telling them it, but maybe they didn’t see).
In any case, I’m going to send this back to Newegg on Monday. This will give me time to get everything (software-wise) back to the way I had it.
When I was at the shop, I asked the guy as I was paying about people telling me to upgrade to Windows 10. He says “you won’t like it as a gamer”, and that I “should be fine” that the new CPU was going to be used with such an ‘ancient’ OS.
So I got it home, plugged it in, and frantically searched for my Windows 7 x64 OEM copy. Turned it on, BIOS wanted my attention (to verify the new hardware was installed).
As I’m going over the menus, I start to hear a very loud clicking sound coming from my computer (like a cable brushing against a fan). The sound got louder and louder, and I turned it off and looked inside, thinking there’s a uncut twist tie rubbing against the CPU fan. But I saw nothing of concern. It wasn’t until later, when the sound finally stopped and I was trying to put the side plate back on, I found out it was the wire attached from the CPU Cooler to the Motherboard, rubbing against the big fan ontop the case.
My father managed to tie the cable down (as I was too scared to touch the wire as I couldn’t find my anti-static band..and you people want me to build a computer?! HAH!!), and the sound was no more.
Installing Windows, was like “Preparing to– DONE!” ..HAH!! HOLY hell was it fast. Good to see what I heard about SSDs, actually being true. I couldn’t imagine how fast Modded Minecraft would load if it was on an SSD. Though, maybe half the time it’s taking now.
As for the boot time, right now I cannot really judge. Even with an HDD (of my size), it’s still pretty fast when you have barely anything there. I wanna see if it’s still fast with all the crap I had on the old drive. Then and only then can I judge, and see if it’s worthy to -maybe- replace my other HDDs with SSDs (at least one of them).
As for the CPU, wow. EIGHT cores on this baby! 😀 Though, I wonder if I made the right decision (as I know of Intel’s CPUs, that more cores aren’t always better). I mean, take the i5. It’s a dual core, but it could be more powerful than the one I just got. It seems clock speed is much more important, than the number of cores.
(Ohh, look at me being a computer wiz, when I have absolutely NO idea what I’m talking about)
Now to get to the other stuff. Before I began downloading/installing a whopping 200 files from Windows Update (that only 195 successfully got through), I whipped out my motherboard driver install CD. After getting the usual installed (sound/internet drivers), I stopped short from installing the CPU chipset drivers. I’m hoping Windows Update took care of it for me.
As for the speed of the install (my old HDD VS this new SSD), It’s..well? Hmm. I feel it was somewhat faster than the HDD, but maybe basing speed over the fact it had 200 files to get, is kind of harsh to judge (as some of them felt like it took the same speed as my old drive).
But what a surprise it was when it took about the same time of seeing the Windows screen after an update (around a minute)..then seeing a black screen for much longer in my primary monitor. Losing my mind here. Decided to see if it’s on the secondary, and sure enough it was. Of course, the way I have my monitor setup, I have to use ‘monitor 2’ as my primary (as the only one that supports HDMI). Turned out it installed a NVIDIA driver (using my GPU instead of the motherboard’s graphics).
There was also another issue (that thankfully had a happy ending).. my ‘E’ drive wasn’t showing up in Windows. So after Windows get done installing the updates and told me to restart, I shut down instead, unplugged everything, and checked to see if the guy accidentally left the drive unplugged when he was working on it. But from what I could see, that wasn’t the case. The only thing of issue I saw, was a loosely-fitting power cable in the E drive. I mean, all of the pins fit and it goes in all the way (and I actually tried to ground myself and fiddled with it), but it just doesn’t feel secure at all.
Decided that it was fine (I doubt it’ll just wiggle itself out on its own). Searched through IE (didn’t have Firefox installed at the time) and discovered I have to go into Administrative Tools > Computer Management > Disk Management. Sure enough, the drive was there, just didn’t have a drive letter assigned to it (as my DVD-ROM snagged it). Messed with the drive letters, and got the E drive reconnected. However, it’s strangely listed as a ‘System’ drive. But (so far), I haven’t seen anything concerning about this.
So all is good in the world!
Finally, the time has come to start moving all of my crap off my external and onto the new C. Started with Firefox, then it quickly escalated to getting Discord and Skype installed to ask people I knew, if they knew where I could find ‘the thing’ I needed. You know, that thing I said would happen after I backed up the C (how there would be a few files remaining)? ..It happened, but not the way you think. I forgot to take a picture of the taskbar icon position, and the plugins I’m using in Firefox (didn’t even think of writing them down either..not smart).
I knew of some of the plugins (NoScript/AdBlock Plus/etc..), but the ones I needed (and didn’t know the names of) were the ones to make Firefox look like I had it before (I like the older XP’ish versions more, as they looked better(IMO)). I did manage to grab ‘Classic Theme Restorer’ (which fixed the ugly tabs to flat ones, and moved them below the bookmarks), but the name of ‘the thing’ still eluded me.
It wasn’t until I was speaking to someone on Discord, when I suddenly started thinking “what if I searched for ‘theme’?” Sixth search result..’Firefox 2, the theme, reloaded’. I found ‘the thing’! Now why couldn’t I had found it A FUCKING HOUR AGO instead of embarrassing myself?!?! Damnit, my brain needs to be upgraded.
Oy. Crisis averted, world is saved. Blog post done. This thing took me longer to edit and write than it did downloading those 200 Windows Updates! SAD!